Category Archives: Advanced Stamping

I’ve been itching to use OPI’s Germanicure for awhile, and I finally made it happen. Here is what I came up with:

Something a little different with the blue, but I like the way it came out.

Here is what I used:

From left to right: Zoya Kym, OPI Germanicure, Moyou London Pro 06, Mundo de Unas Iris, KB Shimmer How You Dune?, and HK Girl. For whatever reason, I forgot to grab my base, which was, as usual, Essie Grow Stronger. I also used two stampers: my Wistonia XL and my Messy Mansion marshmallow.

The first thing I did was stamp the image I wanted to work with, so that it could dry before I filled in the image. Here’s how that looked:

While those dried, I painted Grow Stronger followed by How You Dune? on my ring finger and Germanicure on the other fingers:

While my nails dried, I carefully filled in the image on my stamper, which was dry by now:

You can see that on the white stamper, I tried a few different colors before I settled on Kym. I wanted something that was similar to Germanicure, but lighter. Kym worked for that.

I waited for the images to dry completely, then I added a coat of Oh So Wet on my ring finger (I clearly dropped the ball on my “what I used picture” because I forgot that polish too!). I let that dry a little, but while it was still tacky, I placed the stamp on my nail. When you do that, you must be very gentle so that you don’t make the image smoosh, slide, or do any other number of super obnoxious things.

Once the stamp was placed, I topped each nail with a healthy coat of HK Girl.

It looked a little different with the blue, but I wanted a contrast to the dark polishes, and I think that worked.

Hello and welcome back! This mani is pretty ironic, because when it rains, it pours. As in, when I do one mediocre mani, I do many. Oh well!

This is actually a reboot of a mani I did a few months back. I wasn’t happy with how it came out, and wanted to try again. It turned out slightly better than the first time, but I’m still not thrilled. This may be one I redo several times until I am happy with it.

I started with a coat of Essie Grow Stronger, then one coat of KBShimmer How You Dune?

This is one coat, topped with China Glaze quick dry.

For the stamps, I used Butter London Royal Navy. I stamps pretty well, not that you can tell from my cruddy job here:

But, you get the (cruddy) picture. Once I had the image picked up and dried, I filled in the circles with the pixie dusts I had picked out. To do that, I used a dotting tool to gently add the polishes.

For shiggles, here’s my tin foil mess:

And the filled stamp:

Once that dried, I put a coat of China Glaze quick dry on the nail I wanted to apply the stamp to. I let it dry slightly, then gently applied the stamp.

In this mani, I used a different Pixie Dust for each finger. I was going for a gradient look. It turned out okay. Sort of.

With all of the beautiful fall manis I’ve been seeing lately, I felt inspired to do my own. I had gotten the Moyou Mother Nature 07 Plate specifically for fall manis…it just screams fall to me! So here is what I used for this mani:

From left to right: Rica Glossy Glam, China Glaze Quick Dry, OPI Matte Top Coat, OPI Love, Angel, Music, Baby, Cupcake Polish Rusting Over a Boy, OPI Don’t Mess with OPI, Moyou Mother Nature, 07, Rica Whiteout and Essie Grow Stronger Base Coat. I used Cupcake Polish Rusting Over a Boy as the base for this mani. Here is what it looked like pre-stamping:

I used Rica Whiteout for the stamp:

Then once the stamp was dry (it did not take more than a minute), I filled it in with OPI’s Love, Angel, Music, Baby and Don’t Mess with OPI:

Ignore the terrible picture quality. My camera is older than my children, and the hubs promises to replace it for me. He dislike old technology, which is a win for me! …anywho…I let the polish on the stamp dry completely. It only takes a few minutes and is the key to success. Try to apply the stamp before everything is dry, and the wet polish will ooze out and ruin the design, which is incredibly frustrating. Once I was sure the design was completely dry, I put a coat of the China Glaze quick dry on the nail I planned to apply the stamp to. I waited just a few seconds until it was tacky, then gently applied the stamp to the tacky nail. Since I was using a mural plate and picked up quite a bit of image each time, I was actually able to get two nails out of each stamp. Normally, I wouldn’t do that, but I was feeling brave. It left me with a few stray branches that didn’t quite fit, but overall it worked out quite nicely.

This was all well and good, but it did not feel quite fallish enough for me, so I added OPI’s Matte Top Coat.

This mani was really fun, but a bit time consuming. Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out…especially since I went through a glass (two) of wine while doing this mani. For cocknails, not half bad!

Thank you for stopping by! I look forward to many more fall manis to come!